FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 17, 2006
NOTE: Digital photos of Buddy Guy are available.
CHICAGO, IL - Buddy Guy began life as a sharecropper's son in Jim Crow Louisiana and has gone on to earn his place as a living legend in the music industry. His arrival in Chicago at age 21 - to follow his dream of "just working and being at the blues clubs at night to watch Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Little Walter and them play the blues" evolved into a vibrant career that continues to entertain, inspire and instruct fans, aspiring musicians, entrepreneurs and music scholars.
Guy's contributions to music, American culture and arts education will be publicly acknowledged by Columbia College Chicago on Sunday, May 14 when the college bestows on Guy the title, Doctor of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa.
Guy will receive his doctoral hood and degree during morning commencement for Columbia's School of Fine and Performing Arts and School of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Ceremonies are scheduled for 10:30 a.m. at the UIC Pavilion, 525 S. Racine. Guy will address the assembled graduates and their families after being introduced by Columbia Trustee Steve Devick, CEO of Lionbeach Music, Inc.
"This is the year I will celebrate 50 years being in Chicago and to receive this honor now means a great deal to me," says Guy. "I am very proud and again honored to receive this degree."
"I am really thrilled that we are acknowledging Buddy and his accomplishments this year," says Dr. Warrick L. Carter, president of Columbia. "As a professional musician, I hold Buddy and his work in the greatest esteem. As the president of Columbia - an arts and media college where we educate our students to celebrate a diversity of voices and to author the culture of their times - I can say that Buddy Guy represents the talent, vision, initiative and spirit we value in our students.
"Buddy Guy is one of the significant bluesmen of our time," says Dr. Rosita Sands, executive director of Columbia's Center for Black Music Research. "He belongs to that group of musicians who were more than songsters, they were devoted keepers of the history of their people and important transmitters of American culture and life. Following in the tradition of early blues musicians, Buddy Guy has proven to be a masterful communicator intertwining raw emotion and gutsy expression with harmonies, rhythms and vocalizing that tells the stories and effectively serves to translate the experiences and conditions of black people in this country. As one of the important bluesmen, his contribution to American music, and ultimately the world is certainly worthy of this recognition.
Columbia College Chicago, an urban institution committed to open access, opportunity and excellence in higher education, provides innovative degree programs in the visual, performing, media and communication arts to nearly 11,000 undergraduate and graduate students. Founded in 1890 as a communications school for women, Columbia College Chicago was revisioned in 1963 as a liberal arts college with a "hands-on minds-on" approach to arts and media education and a progressive social agenda. Under the current leadership of President Warrick L. Carter, Ph.D. Columbia is aggressively pursuing this mission. Through the diversity of its students and graduates, the school brings a rich vision and multiplicity of voices to American culture. For further information visit www.colum.edu.
Biography of Buddy Guy
World renowned blues artist Buddy Guy is a pioneer of Chicago's fabled West Side sound and a living link to our city's halcyon days of electric blues. He was seven years old when he fashioned his first makeshift "guitar"--a two-string contraption attached to a piece of wood and secured with his mother's hairpins. It would be nearly another decade before Guy would own an actual guitar--a Harmony acoustic that now proudly sits on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. In 1957 he moved from Louisiana to Chicago, and within months he had taken up residency in Chicago's fabled 708 Club. By the early 1960s, Guy was a first-call session man at Chess Records. As a session man, he backed the likes of Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, and Sonny Boy Williamson. By the decade's end, Guy was staking out new creative territory, cutting albums like 1967's I Left My Blues in San Francisco, his last effort for Chess, and 1968's A Man and the Blues for Vanguard. In the process, Guy, the purveyor of a stinging, attacking electric guitar style and wild, impassioned vocals, was capturing the minds of a growing number of rock musicians. His first three albums for Silvertone--the 1991 comeback smash Damn Right, I've Got the Blues (reissued in 2005), 1993's Feels Like Rain and 1994's Slippin' In--all earned Grammy Awards. Internationally acclaimed, five-time Grammy winner and inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Guy has firmly cemented a blues legacy that places him squarely in the company of his heroes who came before.
Columbia College Chicago Media Contacts:
Micki Leventhal, 312-344-7383mleventhal@colum.edu or
Priscilla Hunter, 312-344-7805, phunter@colum.edu
Jive Records Media Contact: Lori Berk, 212-824-1885, Lori.berk@jiverecords.com